No, Not Today Trivia Quiz

Answer: No, year was 1906

The city of San Francisco was hit by an earthquake which is currently estimated to have had a moment magnitude (the scale which has now replaced the Richter Scale, which itself was not developed until 30 years after this earthquake, to measure the size of earthquakes) of around 7.8 at 5:12am on 18 April 1906. Around 3,000 people died, both in the city and in the surrounding residential areas, and about three-quarters of the city's population were left homeless due to the extensive damage caused both by the earthquake itself and by the subsequent fires (mostly caused by broken gas mains). Over a hundred years later, it is still noted as one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.

Answer: No, month was April

The RMS Titanic started her maiden voyage from Southampton, England on 10 April 1912, stopping in Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland before heading across the north Atlantic en route for New York, USA with 2,224 passengers and crew (and lifeboats capable of carrying only 1,178 people - after all, this ship was unsinkable).

At 11:40pm on 14 April she hit an iceberg which caused multiple compartments to be breached; at 2:20am on 15 April the ship broke up and sank, with over 1,000 people still on board.

It was about two hours later that the first rescuers arrived to take on survivors.

Answer: No, date was 11th

Also known as the Armistice of Compiegne (where it was signed), the agreement to end hostilities came into effect at 11:00am (Paris time) on 11 November 1918, a fact which is recalled in many countries around the world by observing a minute of silence at that time (local time).

The armistice was agreed on at 5:00am of that day, with all signatures in place before 5:30am. Although it signalled the end of active fighting, it did not actually end the war - the Treaty of Versailles, signed six months later at the Paris Peace Conference, was the actual peace treaty that marked the official end to the war.

Answer: No, year was 1937

The LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German airship which came into service in 1936, and had completed a number of successful trans-Atlantic flights (ten to the US and eight to Brazil) before it caught fire while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey at 7:25pm on 6 May 1937.

The disaster was thoroughly covered because of public interest in the new form of transport, so there is a great deal of film and radio descriptions available, including the famous recording of the commentary by Herbert Morrison, which captured the transformation of the event from a routine if somewhat interesting event into a tragedy. On its final flight, the Hindenburg had taken off from Frankfurt, Germany on 3 May with 36 passengers and 61 crew; of these, 13 passengers and 22 crew members died, along with one member of the ground crew.

This accident pretty much ended public interest in airships as a form of travel, especially since the reason why it caught fire has never been satisfactorily determined.

Answer: No, date was 1st

The origins of World War II are far too complex to go into in detail here, but a few salient facts about the background to what is traditionally held to mark the beginning of World War II can be considered. In 1934, Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland, after earlier attempting to weaken the ties between Poland and France, while encouraging Poland to join Germany in opposition to the Soviet Union; Poland did not agree, as the conditions would have made them overly dependent on Germany. During 1939 the Germans carried out a number of staged incidents, in which German soldiers posing as Polish soldiers appeared to attack German territory. On 31 August an "attack" was carried out on a radio station in Gleiwitz, Germany, and the invasion of Poland that began on 1 September 1939 was called the 1939 Defensive War. Popular support was gained by saying that it was being done to liberate the city of Danzig, which had been ceded to Poland in the Treaty of Versailles along with surrounding lands (called the Polish Corridor) that had long been disputed between the two countries.

While Danzig had a German majority, the rest of the region had a Polish majority, but it separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, a situation which was felt to be one of the intolerable conditions of the treaty that ended World War I. The Soviet Union joined the invasion on 17 September (the day after they had ceased fighting a war in the east with Japan), with Slovakia providing supporting troops. The Allied governments declared war on Germany on 3 September, but did not actually provide much meaningful support to Poland, which was divided between the victorious nations on 6 October.

Answer: No, year was 1945

After Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, Allied attention shifted to obtaining an unconditional surrender from Japan, who refused to consider it. Extensive firebombing of Japanese cities destroyed a number of them, in preparation for a planned invasion which was expected to be extremely costly (in terms both of money and of men).

When the Manhattan Project succeeded in detonating an atomic bomb in July, discussion ensued as to the viability of using such a weapon on a Japanese city, to try and persuade the Japanese to surrender rather than face continued bombardment with this new weapon.

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15am on 6 August 1945. On that same day, US President Truman again demanded Japan's surrender, threatening a repetition of the bombing, which occurred on 9 August (the day when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan), when a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

A total of at least 129,000 people died because of these two bombings. On 15 August, Japan announced its surrender, and the official surrender was signed on 2 September.

Answer: No, month was May

The 1953 British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, and financed by the Joint Himalayan Committee, became the first to complete a confirmed ascent of Mount Everest when a New Zealand apiarist and mountaineer named Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit on 29 May, 1953.

It was the ninth recorded attempt to make the first ascent of Everest, and there is still some debate as to whether an earlier expedition had in fact managed to do so, perishing before they could report their success.

The fifteen mountaineers of this expedition were accompanied by a news correspondent from 'The Times' (who made sure the news of their success reached London in time to be announced on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation on 2 June), twenty Sherpa guides and around 360 porters (needed to help with the 5 tons of baggage).

Answer: No, date was 22nd

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was travelling in a limousine with his wife Jacqueline, John Connally (the governor of Texas) and Nellie Connally on Dealey Plaza in Dallas Texas, on his way to a luncheon when he was shot at 12:30 pm CST on 22 November 1963. He was pronounced dead in Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00pm, and the death was officially announced at 1:33pm. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeded to the presidency, and took the oath of office onboard Air Force One just before it took off to take him to Washington, DC. Following a state funeral on 25 November, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery; in 1967 he was reinterred a short distance away, in a grave marked with an eternal flame which is one of the most-visited sites in the cemetery.

Answer: No, year was 1986

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was located near the Ukraine town of Pripyat, near the border with Belarus. At 1:23am on 26 April 1986 a systems test was started, intended to check the efficiency of an emergency core cooling feature which was planned to be used as a part of routine shutdown procedures. Within 45 seconds, it all went horribly wrong, one of the reactors experienced explosions in its core, which sent large amounts of radioactive fuel into the air above it, as well as causing the graphite moderator to catch fire, thereby increaing the dispersal of radioactive materials.

This was the first nuclear accident to be classified at the top value of 7 on the International Niuclear Event Scale; the next one to receive that rating was the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan.

The deaths caused by the Chernobyl disaster cannot be accurately calculated; 31 people died during the actual incident, but the exposure of millions of people to increased levels of radiation in the ensuing months will have produced significant, but currently incalculable, corollary deaths.

Answer: No, month was October

The 1989 World Series was played between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants, teams located on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay, so it was nicknamed in advance as the Battle of the Bay and as the BART Series (in reference to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system); following the postponement of Game 3 due to an earthquake, it has also become known as the Earthquake Series.

At 5:04pm on 17 October 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake (named for a mountain near the epicentre) struck northern California. Because the game was due to start at 5:35, thousands of people were already in Candlestick Park, and television cameras were engaged in pre-game coverage - this led to it being the first major US earthquake to be broadcast live (and picked up by television stations around the world; we even heard about this in Australia, where baseball is far from a major sport). The game was postponed, for obvious reasons. It was finally played on 27 October, and the Athletics won. The next day they also won the fourth game, completing a 4-0 sweep of the series.